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Marshall Po
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
Dr. Hannah Pool
Welcome to the New Books Network. We have the pleasure to welcome R. Ji Sung park to present his new book, Slow Burn the Hidden Costs of a Warming world, published in 2024 by Princeton University Press. Park is an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania where he researches the effects of of the natural environment on labor markets and human capital outcomes. My name is Dr. Hannah Pool and I'm a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Studies of Societies. Welcome, Professor Park.
Professor Ji Sung Park
Thank you, Hannah. It's great to be on your program.
Dr. Hannah Pool
A pleasure to have you here. To begin with, do you want to introduce yourself?
Professor Ji Sung Park
Sure. I thought you did a great job of the introduction, but again, my name is Ji Sung Park. I'm an environmental and labor economist by training. I'm currently a professor, assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania. And yeah, I'm a applied economist who's very much interested in using the tools of economics and statistics to better understand the world around us and then to help us make better informed decisions, whether those are individual or collective decisions. And so as we'll talk a lot about today, the book is about really how sort of new data and some of the research that my colleagues and I and many, many other researchers in this space have done, you know, might help us make more practical decisions about climate change.
Dr. Hannah Pool
And what inspired you to write this book about climate warming and why?
Professor Ji Sung Park
Now, that is a great question. I don't know if there's a clear answer that does justice to the many different reasons and threads, but just to give you a few, and not to get too autobiographical, I mean, I, I've always been interested in environmental issues and that, that I think stems in part from my love for the environment and how much I, how much time I spent in nature growing up. But in terms of the actual impetus for writing a book, you know, it, it grows primarily out of the research that, that I've been doing, really since my PhD on trying to better understand how, again, you know, how is a warmer, how, how does a warmer world affect our everyday lives, our economic activities, our actions, be they in, in significant and salient or in more subtle ways. And the reason why the book felt important to write sooner rather than later is this is sort of my pandemic project, actually. And I think there was this moment, you know, we were all stuck in our homes. We couldn't go anywhere. At this point, my wife and I were living in Los Angeles and there were record wildfires, and the smoke was just. It was this combination of feeling helpless because we were stuck in our apartments all the time, feeling even more helpless because we were stuck. And there was smoke, you know, wildfire smoke coming billowing across the landscape all the time. And then, you know, this was also a period when, I think as a society, we were collectively beginning to grapple even more acutely with, acutely with climate change, not as a future tense phenomenon, but as very much a, you know, a, here now phenomenon. And, and there seemed to be a growing urgency around it. But at the same time, there was a sense in which the discussions around climate change seemed so apocalyptic and doomsday and dire. And I guess the statistics and the research that I was most familiar with, yes, suggested that climate change is very much a serious issue. But also I couldn't help but see a disconnect between. So let me take a step back was a sense of personal motivation because I care about the issue. There was a sense of personal frustration about not being able to do something about the issue that was compounded by the pandemic. And then there was a societal sort of dialogue or discussion that had a tone that I thought personally was perhaps a little bit too symbolic, not enough pragmatic when it came to thinking about not just the apocalyptic 2100, 2200 year, sorry, the year 2100 year 2200 scenario about climate change, but that could benefit from being infused with some of the research and data that I saw so many of my colleagues working on. That painted a slightly more nuanced picture, I would argue, of how climate change might affect society, is already affecting society. And then what that means about what we should do about it in a little bit less black or white, more shades of gray kind of perspective. I know we'll get into all that. That was probably a longer answer than you anticipated. But yeah, there were many factors that contributed to the why now and why the book.
Dr. Hannah Pool
Your book explores the deeper, sometimes hidden consequences of climate warming and what are some of those slow moving impacts, the slow burn, as you call it.
Professor Ji Sung Park
Yeah. So if I could just take one step back, some of this depends in part on where your listener or the reader is coming from. You know, it's one thing if you're a complete climate denier. It's another if you already care a lot about climate change. I think it's the most serious issue I'm going to speak to. I'm going to assume that the, the audience has some sense that, you know, climate change is a physical phenomenon that is caused in part by right. Greenhouse gases that are emitted by humans and that it is already happening. I'm going to sort of skip over all that. Right. And just focus on the question at hand, which is what are the, you know, as you say, what are the slower burning consequences in these are things that I guess are a little bit more subtle and may not lend themselves as well to sort of flashy climate change headlines, especially ones that are spurred by natural disasters like major wildfires or major hurricanes, but ones that at least the data suggests are nevertheless significant in a cumulative perspective. So what am I talking about? We're talking about things like how just moderately elevated temperature, right. Days in the 80s and 90s Fahrenheit, which would be in the high 20s, low 30s, Celsius, what more having more of these days might do to Things like agricultural productivity to labor productivity, to the number of accidents and injuries on the job, to the number of people visiting the error. Right. To the amount of learning that students may or may not be able to engage in, especially in countries and in parts of countries that, you know, don't have infrastructure that is accustomed to dealing with, you know, days in that temperature range during the school year, you know, how hotter days might affect local crime rates and what that does to society all the way to things like wildfire smoke. We see, at least in the US there's a lot of concern about growing wildfire risk and we see news about devastating wildfires seemingly all the time. But I wonder how often do we think about wildfire smoke? And there's some great research by Marshall Burke and other researchers which have tried to sort of pull out in this book as well, highlighted in this book as well, that shows that the downwind consequences of wildfire smoke in a cumulative sense actually may cause a couple of orders of magnitude more mortality events, more death than the actual fire events, the flames themselves. So these are sort of, I guess you can call them hidden, more hidden or subtle consequences of climate change that again, you know, if you look at the data that is available, seem to really add up in ways that are easy to miss.
Dr. Hannah Pool
Jisung, you also write about the cognitive biases that shape how we think or fail to think about climate change. So what are these biases and why do they matter?
Professor Ji Sung Park
Yeah, that's a great question. Let me try to provide a succinct answer. In the book, I reference the great Kahneman and Tversky, thinking fast, thinking slow, sort of paradigm of how, you know, cognitively, we have many ways of approaching different problems and we use different heuristics, right? Mental heuristic, mental shortcuts, if you will. And with climate change, as with so many other complex policy problems, it seems to be true that, that if we rely too much on the, again, what Kahneman, Kahneman and Tversky would call the thinking fast part of our brain, which is much more sort of reactive, associative, you know, thinking in the story that is, that is most easily available, most readily available, we, we may potentially, it may lead us to make decisions that are potentially not as informed as they, as they could be. And in the case of climate change, that's problematic on a number of fronts. One, because it's such a global, it's an issue of such global scale that I think it's very difficult for our minds. I experience a very local climate every day. It's very local to where I am now, which is in Philadelphia. I experienced that local in geography. I experienced it a local climate in time. But then I also, you know, experience the stories that I hear about climate change through whatever prism that I have set up in my phone and my TV and my media and landscape. Media, media, environment. And there's a sense in which, you know, unless we are very careful to think statistically about both the broader global consequences of climate change as well as the costs of doing something about it, that is what we as a society need to do in order to potentially address climate change. There is a risk that we might gravitate toward whatever story seems most emotionally appealing to us, given the state that we're in at the time. So, right. If we're feeling especially pessimistic, for whatever reason, we may gravitate toward the story that, you know, of climate change, that, oh, by 2100, all of, you know, X percent of humanity will be wiped out by heat waves that are too severe, you know, for us to endure. There's a lot of uncertainty in climate change, so there's a risk that we may gravitate toward those. The story, again, that we are most inclined to resonate with at any given moment in time, but the statistical reality is at once both more complex, but also, I would argue, better substantiated and richer. And so, yeah, this has become a longer answer than I think you anticipated. But the point is that by sort of the intention of the book was to help readers add another mental heuristic to their toolkit when thinking about climate change. So there's the sort of the catastrophe aversion, sorry, catastrophe insurance heuristic that I think many of us use for climate change, that I think is a really important one. But to also add a mental heuristic around climate change that is more about the shades of gray on climate change, that might really help us to think about, okay, what are the consequences of living in a two degree world as opposed to a two and a half degree world, as opposed to a three degree world? What are those effects? What are the costs of those consequences for society? And then what does that mean about how aggressively, how seriously we should take the issue of aggressively mitigating greenhouse gas emissions by, you know, toward transitioning our societies toward a cleaner energy infrastructure. Right, which is the first thing one can do, right, to reduce the harms of climate change, and then also to think about what are the decisions that we need to make in terms of adapting to the climate change that is already upon us. And that is at some point, in some sense, somewhat inevitable given the emissions that we've already put up into the atmosphere.
Dr. Hannah Pool
Yeah. And turning to maybe the disasters that are already out there, you compare Hurricane Sandy and Hurricane Katrina. What does this comparison actually teach us about climate vulnerability? And how is this connected to human capital and inequality?
Professor Ji Sung Park
Yeah. Uh, I don't know if we make a direct comparison between the hurricanes per se, but I think the point. One of the points that that part of the book is trying to make is, is really it actually has to do with the components of social damage that hurricanes and other climate disasters might create. So what do I mean by that? So anytime there's a natural disaster, whether it's a hurricane or wildfire or extreme heat wave or a flood, many government agencies will provide estimates of the damages. What did it cost? Right. And typically, certainly in the US Those damage estimates are grounded in large part on assessments of physical capital destruction. Right. So how many bridges were damaged, what percentage of the roads were destroyed, how many homes were flooded? Right. And these are very important numbers. Right, to get a sense of the destruction. And very practically, it's important for insurers to get a sense of how much they need to pay out. But at least in some of our own research, we find that there's also this human capital cost that may be a little bit more hidden, maybe harder to measure. And by no means do we pretend to have, you know, monopoly on the best way to measure it, but when, the way we measure, when we try to measure how natural disasters affect human capital, so the, you know, the amount of learning that students achieve in class, the likelihood that students remain enrolled in college or graduated from high school, et cetera, um, there appears to be a more hidden disruption to learning and other components of what economists call human capital that when you actually add up the numbers, maybe just as significant, maybe at least in the same order of. Of magnitude as these physical capital damages that I just mentioned to you. And so whether it's Hurricane Katrina or Hurricane Sandy or any other storm, the point of. One of the points that the book tries to make is that as a society, we may want to think carefully about not just the more visible physical destruction, but also what has potentially been lost due to these natural disasters from a human capital perspective. But that hopefully gives us some insight into what we can do about it. Right? So what kinds of first, what kinds of relief activities need to be put in place and where to target those? But also, you know, just in thinking, taking a step back and thinking again, about, you know, if I'm still in, if I'm, if I'm trying to make a decision about a, how serious of a problem is climate change and B, what can we do about it? On adaptation, both of those decisions can be informed by understanding the broader scope of damages, the broader set of climate damages that are in play. And so that's, that example is meant to highlight the fact that human capital is also part of those damages.
Dr. Hannah Pool
Thank you. And now to zoom in on heat. How does heat affect the way we work, study or even think what happens, for instance, to school exams or industrial production when temperatures rise?
Professor Ji Sung Park
Yeah, so it turns out hotter temperature can affect us in many different ways. Happy to tell you and your listeners a little bit more about the methods and how we arrive at the results. But just to start with some of the findings that are in the literature and that we have more confidence in. For instance, we know that when students take exams in hotter conditions, on hotter days, they perform worse than they otherwise would have. Right. So, you know, students in New York City public schools who take, you know, their high school exams on a 90 degree Fahrenheit, 32 degrees Celsius day are roughly 10% less likely to pass their subjects than if they would have taken those exams on a, you know, 70 Fahrenheit. I don't know what that is in celsius. Something low 20s Celsius day. That was at least the case, you know, in, in sort of previous decades leading up to around 2014, 2015. So temperature can affect test scores. Hotter temperature can affect test scores. It can also in some instances reduce labor productivity. There's good research looking at how, you know, heat can affect worker productivity in the context of Chinese manufacturing or Indian manufacturing facilities. Although it seems to vary quite a bit in terms of how well adapted the facilities are, what kind of manufacturing we're talking about, obviously how much climate control there is. And then to zoom out, you know, there's some evidence to suggest that hotter temperature can really affect our social fabric in very subtle but important ways. You know, there's great research that shows how local crime rates respond to extreme temperature, especially hotter temperature. You know, there's more petty theft, there's also more violent crime, you know, on hot days. And there's a active debate in the literature about why that is, what, you know, what the mechanisms might be. Is it because people are more likely to be outside and interacting in ways that are not as common when the temperature is lower? Is it because the so called hot tempers hypothesis, is it that when the temperature is higher, we sort of are more impatient, more agitated. Certainly there is some evidence consistent with that. Hypothesis two or something else. Is it a sense that the, you know, the capacities of law enforcement or other social norms may not be as tightly applied on very hot days and that might actually, you know, somehow affect the calculus when it comes to, let's just call it non pro social antisocial activity or criminal activity of any kind. So yeah, so there we, we know, we know more about what the impulse of temperature does in terms of the outcomes. We know less about the exact pathways through which that occurs. But there appears to be, there's quite a bit of evidence now that hotter temperature. Yeah. Can have subtle negative effects on many outcomes. I mean I, I, I've, I've left out probably the most well studied and biggest one which is just health. Right. Human health. Extreme temperature, both hot and cold can be deadly. Extreme heat can be very deadly depending on the level of adaptation of a society. And in fact, if you look at some of the latest research on this topic, climate change is projected to increase heat related mortality very, very significantly. You know, on the order of the order of magnitude is, is quite stunning. I mean if you look at Carleton et al 2023, you know, we're talking about in, in extreme, in some of the more extreme warming scenarios, climate change may, you know, increase heat related mortality at a magnitude that I believe is on par with all of cancers today. Right. By 2100. I think those are the other numbers. I hope I'm not misquoting them. So heat, so to sum up, you know, hotter temperature already has many different effects, negative effects on economic activity, human activity, many of which are quite subtle in nature. But again, if you add them all up, they seem to be pretty significant in magnitude. Limu Emu.
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Professor Ji Sung Park
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Dr. Hannah Pool
To exemplify that. Tell us about the Heat game and maybe what basketball can actually teach us about heat and heat affecting the human body.
Professor Ji Sung Park
Oh, right, the Heat game. Yeah. So I wanted to make this idea a little bit more accessible. But also, you know, I'm also a huge basketball fan and, and I, and I know from my enthusiastic watching of, of basketball documentaries that there was a famous basketball game, an NBA Finals game played in Boston. Now I'm blanking on the year. It's in the book between the Los Angeles Lakers and, you know, of, you know, the Showtime Lakers, Magic Johnson, etc and the Boston Celtics. And for. From the accounts of that time, it appears to have been the case that because there was no air conditioning at all in the stadium during the game and the temperature outside was something. It was a very hot day. It was, it was an unusually hot day for Boston. This is in June. And, you know, everyone in the stadium was sweating. You know, the ref, some of the referees had to take a break. And, and there, you know, there are videos of some of the players having to, you know, put on an oxygen mask just to, you know, to maintain functioning. I just use that as an example to paint a picture of what might, what the link between temperature and human performance might look like. And also to actually underscore the point or accentuate the point that it's actually very difficult to know whether temperature per se was the thing that caused the poor performance of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird during that game and led to a particular outcome. And in the book, that's sort of an invitation for the reader to become a little bit more curious about, well, how could we even ask this question of how does hotter temperature or temperature at all affect human performance in a scientific way that can also inform social and policy decisions about something as wide ranging as climate change? I don't know if I answered your question. That's the Heat game and it's partly because I'm such a big fan of basketball. It's partly as an illustration of how it's really hard to, to know what caused what in the real world. But that there has been quite a bit of, there's a lot. You know, as researchers we put in a lot of effort to try to understand those links and to try to really isolate the, the factor that we think is in this case hotter temperature, the factor that we want to focus on, um, and to really look at that relationship.
Dr. Hannah Pool
And yeah, you're absolutely right. As scientists we always think about the, what causes what. Um, so maybe tell us a bit more about the methods that you apply or also the methods that others have applied that you build on and what you find striking and surprising about them.
Professor Ji Sung Park
Yeah, absolutely. And so I guess here just a little bit of context, right? It's, it's, we're not the first to think about how temperature might affect human performance at all. In fact, there are many, many laboratory experiments dating back to pre World War II studies of British naval officers where officers were placed into a room and they were asked to perform a series of cognitive and physical tasks, things like interpreting Morse code, for instance, under varying temperature conditions. So these were literal experiments that were run to try to understand the effect of temperature on human performance. And these experiments do find a strong correlation, arguably causal relationship between temperature and task productivity. So there's good basis to believe that human, human performance is affected by temperature. There's also been a lot of correlational evidence and anecdotal evidence from looking at real world data that notes that hotter places tend to be poorer on average. This is true actually across countries. It's also true within countries. Both of these approaches have their pros and cons. The laboratory experiments are great in that you're literally experimentally varying one thing, which is temperature, and so you have much higher confidence that the effect is indeed different driven by hotter temperature. But the downside is that if the question of interest, if the policy relevant question of interest is, well, what will climate change mean for the economy or for economic outcomes, you name your economic outcome, then laboratory experiments like the one that I described just now, they may be limited in the, in the fact that the stakes are not as high or they're different from the real world. They also may be limited in the sense that you're, you're artificially constraining adaptation to be zero. Right? You're, you're in a sense not able to actually, you're not able to see how human beings would actually respond in the real world when they may have access to various adaptations. Right. Whether that's, you know, moving to a room that has air conditioning, installing air conditioning, moving the time of day in which that activity occurs, moving to a different place altogether. So. Right. So laboratory experiments are limited in their sort of external validity in that sense. If you want to think about climate change, on the other hand, you know, we all know that correlation isn't causation. There are many other reasons why you would be sus. You would. You would be suspicious of a correlation that was drawn between hotter and poorer countries and richer and colder countries. And one tried to make an inference about how hotness causes poorness in an economic sense. But if I had to sort of summarize the mythological approach that again, this discipline, this literature has taken and that I've taken in much of my own research is really to blend types of studies. So to really focus, to really sort, to leverage the power of experimental techniques, but using observational data in such a way that we might be able to make it as if nature herself has run a series of quasi experiments. And to ask carefully, ask, what can we learn from those quasi experiments? Specifically looking at fluctuations in temperature or variation in precipitation within a given place, within a given individual's experience over time, and trying to map out what those fluctuations have meant for the outcome of interest, whether it's test scores, crime rates, labor productivity, workplace injuries, etc. To give us a better sense of how these climatic hazards might affect these societal outcomes in settings that are economically meaningful and allowing for adaptation. Right. To the effects of climate change, of climate, first of all, as well as climate change, to be embedded in those effects that we uncover. Does that answer your question?
Dr. Hannah Pool
Yes, really interesting, thank you. And you also explore emotional sentiment, how temperature can change our mood, as you just discussed, but even influence peace or conflict. What have you found there?
Professor Ji Sung Park
Yeah, so to be clear, that chapter of the book is drawing from not my own research, but others in this field. Um, it's quite a rich literature. It's a growing literature that attempts to better understand, as you mentioned, the links between. So there's a micro piece of this and the macro piece of this. The micro piece is sort of how does. How does temperature specifically, and climate change more broadly, to include. Include things like precipitation shocks, drought, et cetera, affect our personal mental health, the micro and societal sort of conflict generally. It's a rich literature. There's still a lot of debate in the literature, but here's some of the things that stood out to me as I was doing the research for the book and writing it. You know, hotter temperature can affect extreme temperature in general actually can affect your mood in ways that show up in the data that might be somewhat surprising. So if you know there's a great paper by Patrick Bayless who, who took data from Twitter now X and showed that you know, even netting out one's own individual propensity to use profanity profane words on on his or her their Twitter feed that on hotter than average days the likelihood of, of using sort of aggressive phrases, you know, phrases that are indicative of this person being agitated was much higher. Right. So that's just one micro example. But if you zoom out there's also evidence consistent with this idea that for, for whatever reason and again I think the my read of the literature is that the specific causal pathways are not fully agreed upon but hotter than average years appear to lead to more conflict. This great paper by Sol Sheng and Great papers by 10 Miguel so Sheng, Marsham Burke and others that finds that the amount of conflict that occurs in a society appears to be very much related to climatic fluctuations, particularly hotter temperature and extreme precipitation. So I think you know, those and other studies point point to important potential links between a changing climate and both just our general sense of comfort and mental health. I didn't mention but there are studies that also link right extreme weather events to self reported mental health and visits the hospitals due to mental health deterioration. But all of these studies I think point paint a picture of again this sort of even if it's not the end of the world tomorrow, you know, a hotter climate may just be making human flourishing just a little bit harder, you know, on all these dimensions and potentially a lot harder if a lot harder, a lot more difficult if if indeed a changing climate does lead to more, more violent conflict which as we know can be so costly for a society.
Dr. Hannah Pool
Jisung, you've written very beautifully also about your own very personal connection to nature including your time as a student in Australia. How has that shaped the way you understand our relationship with the planet?
Professor Ji Sung Park
That's a very deep question. Let me as I mentioned at the outset Hannah, I, I, I consider myself a child of the outdoors. I very much, many of my fondest memories growing up were of spending time in nature and in fact I actually wanted to before, before wanting to become an environmental economist. My first I guess occupational fascination was to become a, an ecologist, a biologist. So I, I, that's why I was in the Australian rainforest doing a rainforest ecology program. I mean from, I believe that as a social scientist, you know, we, our methods. Let me take a step Back. Those experiences in nature for me inform the questions that I have cared about so far in life. They inform how I go about my daily lives. They, of course, they do not necessarily inform my judgment around particular policies or what we should do about climate change. In fact, I'm very much a believer in letting the data tell us, you know, what is or is not socially beneficial outcome or decision. And as a social scientist, I'm, I'm very much wedded to this idea that, you know, you let the data speak and our methods are very much about, you know, using the scientific method to, to uncover the reality as it is. But I guess one can, you could say that, yeah, my personal experience is definitely in nature, definitely informed the decision to want to better understand climate change as a phenomena. Right. Because it was clear to me that there was some link between the environment that we live in and our well being. Just wanted to understand better what that was and how we might quantify that.
Dr. Hannah Pool
Thank you. And as a last question in your book, you write, and here I quote you, that becoming familiar with how climate change hurts us, should anything give us a greater sense of hope? Not a hope born of wishful thinking, but an active hope born of clear discernment, a sober assessment of climate vulnerabilities. And what does this active hope really look like for you?
Professor Ji Sung Park
Yeah, thanks for highlighting that quote. I think what I'm trying to say there, Hannah, is that we really need to guard against hopelessness. That isn't to say that we should be, you know, blindly optimistic for no good reason, but this lack of agency, I think is something that is really problematic in, in the, in the climate kind of policy sphere. I see so many people, including young people who just sort of, they read the news and then they, and then they're, they, they, they feel that they have no power, that they can do nothing about this. And I think that's dangerous because we always have agency. And part of the motivation behind the book was to give us maybe more data points and more tools for thinking about climate change. Less, again, less as a matter of are we all doomed or not? Is it black or white? But really shades of gray, which then give us a sense of, oh, actually, you know, it's not too late to one, make a difference on mitigation. Right. It's not too late to continue to find ways, both individually and collectively, to transition toward clean energy economy right away from fossil fuels, and also to be more proactive about thinking about how to adapt, right, to the climate change that is already in the system. We can do those things together, right? We can reduce the harm that is done by an already warming planet while also continuing to make the investments that are needed to prevent runaway climate change in the longer term. And so that's, that's where I think the hope and agency comes in. I think, I think if you, if you let, if, if one lets oneself view climate change through a prism of, you know, imminent catastrophe, then it can really rob you of your agency. If you view it through a prism of, oh, okay, it's, it's a complex problem, it's many shades of gray. Every amount of emissions reduction, you know, does have an, a positive effect on stabilizing the climate in the long run. To me, that's cause for hope.
Dr. Hannah Pool
Thank you very much. And now as really the final, final question, what are you currently working on? What questions are occupying your mind these days?
Professor Ji Sung Park
So many. But the broad gist, the thematic gist is we're very interested, my colleagues and I are very interested, among other things, in this process of adaptation. Right. It is worth noting that, you know, even without the policy backsliding we've seen in recent months in the US and elsewhere, you know, we're always going to have to contend with climate change. The world has already warmed by a significant amount and will continue to warm up. And that warming has consequences, in some cases quite severe consequences, in other cases, more subtle consequences. But if you look at the evidence, there's good reason to believe that those consequences can be greatly minimized. And this matters whether you're a business owner or a teacher or a mayor, or just an individual trying to protect your home or your assets and your livelihood. And so I'm really interested in.
Dr. Hannah Pool
How.
Professor Ji Sung Park
Those adaptation decisions can be made in such a way that are consistent with both our individual and collective objectives. And really what might be the impediments to more efficient and equitable and cost effective adaptation. So those are some things that we're thinking about, not thinking about these days.
Dr. Hannah Pool
And we are looking forward to reading more about it. Thank you so much for the interview, Jisung. This was fascinating. Thank you.
Professor Ji Sung Park
Thank you, Hannah. Thank you, Hannah, for your.
Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Dr. Hannah Pool
Guest: Professor R. Jisung Park
Episode: "Slow Burn: The Hidden Costs of a Warming World" (Princeton UP, 2025)
Release Date: October 25, 2025
This episode features an in-depth conversation with Professor R. Jisung Park about his new book, Slow Burn: The Hidden Costs of a Warming World. Park, an environmental and labor economist, explores the less visible, “slow burn” impacts of climate warming on society. Moving beyond apocalyptic narratives, the conversation dives into nuanced costs—particularly how rising temperatures subtly but significantly affect productivity, learning, labor markets, inequality, and even human behavior.
The conversation is open, nuanced, and analytical, mixing deep research insights with personal experience. Park advocates for clear-eyed pragmatism—encouraging listeners toward agency and thoughtful action without veering into despair or blind optimism.
This summary is designed for those who may not have listened to the episode but want a thorough, engaging account of its substance and spirit.